Portugal Depended Mainly On Renewable Energy For Four Days

Portugal boldly took the step to run depending entirely on renewable energy for four days. The whole country used no other electricity supply from Saturday 6.45am until Wednesday 5.45pm.

In spite of the blockades in purchasing renewable energy being experienced by large energy consumers, Portugal managed to use sustainable electricity for a number of days. This acts as one of the most recent developments in the country's efforts to lower the their use of coal and natural gas as source of electricity. These have been their primary energy sources for years.

Newsworms reports that this act came after months of deliberations, meetings and discussions among stakeholders and committee members followed by the approval and release of the National Policy on Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency. The policy was aligned with strategies from National Energy Policy, Rural Electrification Strategy and Plan, Millennium Development Goals and the National Economic and Development.

Portugal receives the most sunshine among the European countries, and this is the reason behind the Portuguese government's optimism in considering solar energy to play a momentous part in their sustainable energy efforts.

Portugal's sustainable energy effort was intensified after being labelled as one of the biggest CO2 emission producers in the whole of Europe. This also comes in response to an EU directive released in 2009 aiming to have Portugal's energy mix with 31 percent renewable energy share by 2020, as per The Independent.

Presently, the country uses 1.2 percent electricity from solar, one quarter from wind , 30 percent from hydropower and 6.4 percent from biofuels and waste.

Aside from Portugal, Nigeria, a country about the size of Maine and having a population of 170 million, has also done efforts in launching renewable energy proposal to resolve energy crises such as in Sierra Leone.

Microsoft in 2012 implemented the reduction of their carbon emission by 9.5 million metric tons. Facebook on the other hand plans to have half of their electricity source from renewable energy by 2018, according to Roberto Gato.